


Coming Home

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [151]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Comfort, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Friendship/Love, Loneliness, Love, M/M, POV Loki (Marvel), Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:33:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26454184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: When you lock yourself away from him at the start of Midgard’s quarantine, it doesn’t take long before Loki grows to miss you.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [151]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 20
Kudos: 175





	Coming Home

**Author's Note:**

> For this first Lullaby post-hiatus, I think I kind of wanted to ease into it by writing a...follow-up to one of my earlier ones. This is meant to be essentially just Loki's POV of the events in [In His Arms](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23368342). Just as a reminder: I will be posting new Lullabies again, but weekly now, instead of nightly. Every Sunday around this time (unless I get a lot of feedback that people want them earlier/later), you can expect to get a new short little story that I hope will carry you through the week! I missed Loki while I was off, man. It feels good to be writing for him again.

There was a lot that Loki had looked forward to when he first came to stay with you in your apartment. Of course your relationship was still rather new, but you’d locked yourself down at the very start of your world grinding to a halt, and he’d just...missed you. That seemed unthinkable in itself, but he did his best to avoid dwelling on it for as long as he could. Sending an illusion of himself to go and see you wasn’t nearly enough for him, and it hadn’t been hard to see that it was hurting you too. When, one night, you tearfully asked him to stop coming to see you because it only made you feel more alone when he left again, he’d been hurt at first. Angry. But the truth in your words was inescapable, and the hollow ache in his chest had only grown. So he’d gathered up all of his strength and all of his powers and transported himself to your doorstep.

Despite the aforementioned newness of the relationship, he’d been oddly certain that you would let him in. Beyond that, he was nearly as certain that you’d do it happily, rather than simply because he was already there. It was impossible to miss the way your entire face lit up whenever you spotted him, especially after any length of time spent apart. Your eyes would widen a bit before your lips curled into the tiniest private smile, and then finally split wide into a beaming grin. He loved the way you took him into your arms. You held him with every last scrap of your mortal strength and fit your body against his like maybe you needed him to keep you on your feet. 

He loved your warmth. Long before he gained the courage to speak words like that aloud to you, he knew that he loved your warmth. When you sat next to him, or held his hand, or ran your fingers through his hair, it just radiated off of you. He ran colder than others did, and he’d always known that, but for all his time here, he hadn’t cared. It didn’t bother him. But the heat from your body put things into a sharper focus and suddenly he craved the feeling of your warm hands on him. Especially once he no longer had access to you. He wanted you curled beside him in his bed. He wanted your hand in his. 

That in itself irritated him for a while. He wasn’t used to this. By now he’d lived all this time without ever feeling something like this for anyone else—let alone for a _mortal_. It stung his ego. He sulked around the Tower for a while, irritable and snappish. Stark was the first to speak up: “Alright, Reindeer Games, you’ve _got_ to stop taking it out on the rest of us just because you’re not getting it from your little piece of ass anymore.”

Loki snarled despite himself. He wanted to rip Stark’s throat out. But it wasn’t because of the way he was speaking to him, the way it might have been not long ago. It was because of the way he spoke _about you_. Thor had grabbed him just in time, and managed to keep him from wiping that smarmy, insufferable, aren’t-I-so-cute grin off of Stark’s face.

He didn’t say a word to you about it. Maybe that was unfair. He should have given you the opportunity to turn him down. But he was too selfish for that, too selfish by far, and so he’d kept his mouth shut. He stopped contacting you altogether, even by phone, because the questions kept threatening to bubble out of him. _Can I see you? Can I touch you?_ _Can I hold you?_ He spent his time gathering up all his strength—he could teleport through Midgard, but it was so much more draining here than it was in Asgard. And then, one evening, he went to you.

This was all so new to him. The sentiment. There was still something cruel and nasty inside him that laughed at how ardently he wanted you. He didn’t deserve anything about you. He was foolish for being so obvious about it. Your lifespan was a mere flicker in time compared to his: he was willingly and even joyously setting himself up for the heartbreak of watching you wither and die. He’d been truthful, all those ages ago, when he’d tried to reason Thor out of loving that scientist. He hadn’t simply been trying to hurt him.

But there was something about you and inside you that drew him in regardless. Holding you against his body gave him such an alien sense of peace that he had no choice but to believe that it was worth it. When he first saw you there, standing in the doorway to your small—but cozy—sitting room and gaping at him, it’d been very difficult to keep from immediately going to you, but he’d managed it. He watched you work through any number of things in those fleeting moments there. You were an open book. You were unafraid of showing your emotions so clearly on your face. It made him want to take your cheeks in his hands and scatter soft kisses along your nose and your cheekbones, but then he’d watched a hesitant sadness settle in over your features, and he’d held back. 

You thought he was still an illusion. 

Despite that, you sat with him on your sofa and you chatted with him. He watched the way you fidgeted, the way you played with your fingers and picked at your clothing. You didn’t say a word about it, but he could feel your desperation to reach out and touch him. It was like you had to physically restrain yourself from doing so by working your fingers into the folds of your clothing. When you pulled your sleeves down over your hands, he was filled with a sharp and insistent urge to fold you into his arms and never let you go. There was so much that he could never say to you. Like how lonely he had been for so long, and how it’d just sat there and festered inside him until it turned to something even more foul. Like how pure evil had sought out the softness in the back of his mind and used it to tear him apart. How he’d tortured him beyond the edge of anything imaginable so that the toxicity inside bubbled up to consume him. 

But you, in all your softness and your grace, with your gentle fingers and trusting gaze, you settled all of that the first time you reached out to take his hand. The first time you shaped your mouth around his name. The first time you allowed him to kiss you, and the first time you’d stretched up onto your tip-toes to kiss him back. It was not your job to heal him; he knew that perfectly well. There was plenty about himself that he knew he had to work through on his own before he’d ever be truly worthy of you. But in the quiet moments leading up to this larger moment here in your living room, you did help to heal him. 

And when he asked you to kiss him, and you finally relented after telling him over and over again that you didn’t have the strength to watch when your touch made the illusion disappear, and he felt the easy way you leaned into him, it all felt like something he’d once been promised. It felt like a homecoming. It felt like a blessing. 

When you realized that he was real, he heard the hiccuping sobs that threatened to choke you and he wanted to wrap himself around you entirely. To keep you safe and protected and loved.

And you let him.

By the norms, you let him.


End file.
